Lichtenberg Figures
by Penn Flinn
Summary: The days between the particle accelerator and Barry's transfer to the lab are silent, broken-but perhaps the arrival of a certain comatose stranger is the spark that can help them put the pieces of their shattered world back together.
**Happy last week of hiatus-I did promise you some one-shot fics over break, didn't I? This turned out a bit longer than I'd anticipated and therefore took more time than I'd planned for. But here it is at last. I just really love the friendship of the STAR team, and I love the friendship of Caitlin and Cisco. This could definitely be read as Killervibe, but the intention was mostly friendship, because I can't get enough of it. I wanted to explore what those days following the particle accelerator explosion were like, and specifically how Barry brought the two of them together again.**

 **Enjoy!**

* * *

He asks around everywhere, but nobody's seen her. Granted, in the midst of the chaos, nobody is really paying attention to much outside of their own bubble of safety, but Cisco asks everybody—every single person he passes.

It's been two hours since the particle accelerator explosion, and the world is a kaleidoscope of dust and smoke and low voices that all blend together at a point: over time, Cisco has found, the pieces become less distinct and settle like sediment on the oceanic floor of his brain. They cover his thoughts and numb him, but they no longer register as distinct points of agony. They won't until he sifts through them again, at least.

"A blue dress," he insists, cornering a technician who is attempting to patch up loose wiring, who will probably end up quitting in a few hours time when he realizes how useless it all is. "I…I mean, I think she was wearing a blue dress. It could have been….no, it was blue, she likes blue…"

The technician dismisses him. There are other, bigger problems to worry about. People have probably died here tonight.

 _No, they have died._

He swallows thickly.

He finds her, finally finds her, in an empty room far from the pipeline, far from everybody who is swarming the place like antibodies to a wound, and she is—she's wearing that blue dress, the one that Cisco remembers, but it's crumpled and dirty, and Caitlin's face is in shadow.

"I've been looking for you for half an hour," he pants, though it is unnecessary. She knows as well as he does that the seclusion was intentional. "Everything is falling apart. We should get out of here. Dr. Wells has been taken to a hospital—he was hurt in the explosion—and I'm not sure it's safe here anymore."

It's only after he's spouted off those words, words born in a fit of lingering panic that has thrived since the explosion—since he let Ronnie die—that he notices Caitlin's shoulders shaking.

"I don't know what to do," she whispers. "He's gone…I don't know what…Ronnie…"

Cisco's heart sticks in his throat. He steps forward. "You're in shock. We need to get you to a doctor."

"I am a doctor," Caitlin says. It has the sharp potential of being a biting comment, but it comes out too watery to make an impact. "I'm supposed to be able to save people. Help them."

This is the first time he's seen her since the pipeline—they got separated pretty quick, what with the rush of paramedics and technicians and firemen and police swarming the building—and it's the first time he glimpses the hollowness left in the wake of her explosive sadness after that walkie-talkie conversation. He puts his own grief aside, if only for a moment, to sit beside her and place a hand on her quivering shoulder.

They're just co-workers, he thinks. But he grips the fabric of her dress anyway and watches her cry. Watches her cry for the first, and the last, time.

* * *

Three soft knocks to the door. He doesn't want to scare her, or wake her if she's sleeping. Somehow he doubts that she is.

Still, he's just about to walk away when she opens the door.

"Hey."

She doesn't reciprocate the greeting. Her eyes are home to shadows, her hair a tangle of curls and frizz. She's still wearing the blue dress, six hours later.

"I wasn't sure if you'd be back from the hospital yet, I—"

"I never went to the hospital. They gave me a shock blanket. Then I left."

"Oh, right."

Cisco shuffles awkwardly on the doorstep.

"Anyway, I just figured you might not want to be alone."

Caitlin's face creases into a series of hard lines, her eyes sharp despite the obvious fatigue. He sees instantly that she doesn't catch the underlying message: I _don't want to be alone._

"I'm tired, Cisco. I need some time."

"Of course, sure." Awkwardly, he holds out large brown paper bag. "I brought you some Chinese food, anyway. I mean, I brought enough for two, but maybe if you save some of—"

She smiles tightly. "Thanks, Cisco. Get some rest."

The door closes in his face. He lowers the hand holding the bag, heart sinking with it.

He'll be eating Chinese for a week.

* * *

He's drawn back to the lab, eventually. He doesn't know why. Maybe it's a sick sense of guilt, or responsibility, even though he knows it's not his fault. There's a hole blown in the roof of STAR Labs, and he knows it's not his fault, but he feels the pang still as he walks through the doors.

9 AM sharp. Wells would always hound them about punctuality—the habit has stuck. Even though Wells is still in the hospital, his condition still unknown, Cisco can picture his voice, wafting through the halls. _Cisco. Right on time_.

It comes as a surprise, then, seeing her at one of the desks when he waltzes into the cortex. Stupid. He's only brought one coffee.

"Vanilla latte?' He offers his cup stupidly, though he's already drank from it. Caitlin doesn't even look up from her workstation. She's wearing blue again, though she's at least changed out of the dress.

"Why are you here?" she asks instead of accepting.

"Better question: why are you here?" he counters. "You should be home, resting."

"I've still got a job to do, don't I?'

"Do we?" Cisco drops his bag in a nearby chair and crosses his arms. "I'm not sure there even is a STAR Labs anymore, after last night."

"Then why are you here?" Caitlin punches a few more keys, her face impassive. "Dr. Wells is still in the hospital. I'm just here to start going through paperwork. I see no reason for you to come into work."

"What, with the whole 'workplace on fire' thing?" Cisco says. "Old habits die hard. Although nobody else seems to share the feeling." He pauses. "I could help you with the paperwork. It's a bit of a lonely job, isn't it?"

"I prefer it lonely." No eye contact, no attempt at connection. Cisco stands there a few more moments, hand extended in a useless attempt at comfort, before retreating awkwardly out of the quiet room.

* * *

They had been co-workers, sure, but Cisco is certain that they were friends as well. And so he's not sure, exactly, how to deal with the fact that now there is a barrier of ice between them whenever they pass, and that her eyes haven't met his since that brief moment of reconciliation following the explosion.

"Am I going crazy?" he finally asks her the next day, when they have gotten the call that Dr. Wells is returning to the facility, albeit on wheels instead of his own two feet. "Did I do something to offend you? You can talk to me, right?"

Instead of responding, Caitlin averts dry eyes and brushes past him.

"Caitlin," he tries again, desperate. "Talk to me."

"You didn't do anything," she responds without turning around. "I just need my space. Please, give me my space."

She walks away without another word.

* * *

And he does. He tries, at least. It gets harder to give her space when Wells returns, wheeling through the doorway cumbersomely. Wells doesn't try to convince them that everything is normal; in fact, they're the only two workers who have stuck around, which speaks to that fact immensely. They're free to go, he tells them both, and there are no guarantees if they stay. They do stay, of course, unanimously. Cisco isn't sure why he does, and he's even less sure why Caitlin does—once the cleanup work starts again she speaks even less.

"Is everything alright with Dr. Snow?" Wells asks Cisco a few days later in one of the quiet, quiet hallways. "I mean, aside from her loss."

In Cisco's opinion, the loss is reason enough, but he swallows the retort. "I think she needs time to process everything. Away from people." Wells' lips tighten. "To be fair, I don't know her that well."

"Funny, it seemed to me like she was your closest friend in this facility."

"Try telling her that." Cisco punctuates the remark with a jerk of the head. "Things have changed so much in such a short period of time. I'm not sure workplace relationships are top of her priority list right now."

"It seems to me they may be more important than ever," Wells says. Then he adds, more softly, "Detachment is dangerous; I worry that if she doesn't thaw soon, she will freeze indefinitely. Don't give up reaching out to her."

"It's not like things are going to change overnight," Cisco says. "She lost everything. Healing isn't going to be some magical lightning strike."

The corner of Wells' mouth twitches. "I think you'd be surprised."

* * *

"His name is Bartholomew Allen. Goes by Barry."

"Good for him. Why is he here?"

Wells removes his glasses and polishes them carefully. "He was struck by lightning the night of the particle accelerator explosion."

Cisco's gut twists. "Ouch. Still don't get why Roy Sullivan here has to take up residence in our dilapidated lab."

"He's been going into unexplained cardiac arrest, shutting down the hospital's power each time he does."

That warrants a frown. "That doesn't make any sense."

Although the two of them are alone in the hallway, Wells lowers his voice. Habit, Cisco supposes, after all of the suspicious murmuring surrounding the STAR Labs crew these days. "I have reason to believe that the lightning strike was a direct result of the dark matter influx."

Cisco's gut coils further. "We did this to him?"

Wells nods. "And it's our responsibility to help him. I believe we have the resources to save his life here, and I also believe that it's our responsibility to do so."

The waves of change never stop, Cisco reasons. There's a part of him that wants to say _no, we've just terrorized half of the city, our lab is destroyed, all of our employees have abandoned us, you are in a wheelchair and I killed Ronnie and Caitlin is depressed and we can't just take in a dying stranger there's no time for this,_ but in the end he just nods because that's what he's supposed to do.

"Is Caitlin with him now?"

Wells tips his head. "You should go to her, Mr. Ramon. See if she needs any help. Depending on how long this Mr. Allen is with us, the two of you may be spending a lot of time together."

The notion makes Cisco queasy, but he forces a smile. "Yeah. On it, boss."

The cortex is deathly quiet when he enters. Naturally, the first thing his eyes go to is the hospital bed set up along the wall—hospitals have always freaked him out, and seeing his workspace converted into a makeshift one doesn't sit well. The man in the bed is too pale, highlighted by a mess of brown hair and a swath of freckles across his bare chest. A tangle of wires spills out of the bed, connected to all manner of beeping, flashing machines that don't seem to indicate anything good.

Beside the bed, Caitlin fixes an IV bag and chews her lip. Cisco stuffs his hands in his pockets.

"Tough luck, right? Being struck by lightning, I mean."

Caitlin clears her throat but says nothing.

"Barry, huh?" Cisco moves forward slowly, shifting his gaze from Caitlin to the man in the bed. "Is he going to be okay?"

"He's been in a coma for two days already from an acute lightning strike." They're the first words Cisco's heard her speak in days, so he stays quiet despite knowing he's about to get the unwanted gory details. "He's suffering from cardiac arrhythmia and unexplainable seizures, plus third degree burns at the lightning's entry and exit points. Which are healing at a remarkable rate." At this, she frowns.

"That didn't answer my question."

Caitlin sighs, and Cisco might have been concerned about the fatigue in her face if he hadn't accepted it as normal a few days back. "Who knows, Cisco. At this point, I'm not sure how much we can do for him, or what Wells even _wants_ us to do with him. There's no telling what kind of brain damage he's been subjected to, even if he does wake up."

"Wells thought this might have something to do with the particle accelerator, the dark matter," Cisco says. Anything to keep her talking. "He doesn't think this is a normal case. He really believes that it's our duty to save this guy."

"Or study him." Caitlin looks up with sharp eyes. Startled, Cisco sinks into a chair at the bedside.

"So you're not sure how long he'll be here?"

"Could be days. Weeks. Months."

"Let me guess: years?"

"Or he could never wake up." Caitlin reaches over for the sheets and tucks them tighter around the man's still form. It's a protective gesture, too tender for a stranger. At the last moment, Cisco notices that her hands are trembling.

"Well," Cisco says, looking back at her. "I suppose we'll be stuck together for a while yet. Like Wells said, it's our…responsibility, to look after him. As long as we can. We owe that to him."

Caitlin sits in a chair across the bed from Cisco and runs a hand across her face. "I'm just so tired."

The moment of silence stretches into seconds, minutes. They listen to the steady beep of the heart monitor and the whirr of the oxygen machine. Caitlin resumes chewing her lip, and Cisco picks at the edge of the band-aid wrapped around his thumb.

"What do you think he did for a living?"

The softness in her tone catches him off-guard, and it takes him a moment to formulate a response. "Um, I'm not sure. Professional wrestler?"

Caitlin doesn't smile, exactly, but he senses the shift. "I was thinking something more intellectual. Maybe a rocket scientist."

"Wishful thinking on your part, maybe?" Cisco teases. "I could always check out his Facebook page."

"Isn't that a little bit invasive?"

"Look, if we're going to be looking after this guy for potentially weeks or months or years, I say we get to know him a little."

The lightness disappears from Caitlin's face as quickly as it arrived and she lowers her head. She gathers herself and Cisco's half-smile fades. "I'm sorry. This is hard, all of it."

"I know." He does. He knows. "But we've got each other, right? We're still here, both of us. Well…" He motions at the body in the bed. "The three of us, I guess."

"You're pretty optimistic for a guy whose life just crumbled apart," Caitlin whispers.

"I guess we don't know each other very well either, if you're just figuring that out," Cisco returns. Caitlin blinks at the floor a few times, and Cisco can't tell if she's crying or contemplating or shutting down again, so he clears his throat. "Looks like we've got a long night ahead of us. You like Chinese food?"

He holds up his phone, awkward, and everything feels dulled, like pain after morphine, but Caitlin looks up and still manages to hold his gaze long enough to make him feel as if something is changing.

Offering Chinese food over the body of a comatose and potentially dying man might not be conventional, he realizes after the fact. But the truth is, this long night ahead of them is the first of many long nights, and both of them collide and crumble together with the weight of the exhaustion and grief and fear behind them—but somehow, over the body of a comatose man, they finally begin to rebuild.

* * *

 **Thank you so much for reading! I'm hoping to publish another little one-shot later this week, and hopefully start posting my next longfic by next week. As always, if you could take the time to leave a review, I would very much appreciate it.**

 **Till next time,**

 **Penn**


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